I write this in a vim buffer not too far from the television in the other room playing some music. I've been in a shitshow mess of a headspace the last few weeks following the dissolution of my long term relationship and the amicable seperation I had with my most recent employer as well as some other interpersonal shit that this isnt about.
I'm writing this as an ode to the machine who has never made me feel anything other than competant and safe. And further an ode to those who came before me to build these altars of reason and the networks that connect them. I think the first hackers were monks; they spent all their time thinking and focusing on their tasks and the "metas" related and figured out further refinements to those tasks.
Their dedication to the preservation and distribution of knowledge is another striking similarity. Neither are content with the life of a commoner who does not question the position in the universe ther were handed and the plans that mightve been made for them. Where they differ though is that a monk will accept the mission and only question its purpose; whereas a hacker will spit on a mission they dont have a fiscal interest or passion in.
one of the earliest bits of information infrastructure we have is the printing press which obsoleted some funtion of the monostatic practitioners. Press operators took up the mantle of information distribution and for the first time we made a significant dent in reconnecting the collective unconciousness. We lowered the latency of ideas across the board. bad ones could die quicker; good ones could spread quicker.
Eventually we figured out the telegraph, the telephone and the fax machine. This all leads up to THE MOMENT in the 70s that changed everything. Xerox Parc started doing "the mother of all demos" and started showing off a cute little toy called a desktop computer. no big deal its just a passing fad...
Fast forward to the mid 90s
That idea xerox was showing off is now being pushed to office buildings and schools across the planet; people are putting them in their homes and are sharing information directly to eachother eliminating almost all the previous middlemen. Ideas have almost no latency now. You can have a thought and it will either be shot down or approved of in the next few minutes in hours if its good enough it might become slightly memetic across the fourm and you've been established in culture.
as time marches on we go to the web2 era and eventually the era of platforms. But how does it all work? Do you even consider the amount of shit that has to go right for your tweet to send?
For 1 your device needs to be functional; that required millions in R&D to produce another few million in marketing and more in engineering and FFC approval. All so you could pick it up off of a shelf and have it work. Next you need some kind of network connectivity from your device; that means you have some kind of preconfigured router or modem in most cases that was distinctly designed to work in as many situations as reasonable to assume without any iterference from a user. Once it leaves your network it then bounces between a bunch of other networking eqipment all carefully maintained and configured by agile minds. and even if one of them slips up the system can still route due to its inherit deisgn. Then it hits twitter/X infra and thats a whole nother mess of systems each having to be maintained by someone incredibly smart.
And thats what happens whenever you upload your lunch to some website. Do you know who ANY of the people involved in that process are? Its the same process and in some cases people for almost anything in our society that connects to the internet. You could name 5 celebrities right now but not one person who is basically one of many atlas' holding up society unthanked.